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Katz kickstarts project for better Rails on Mac OS X

Yehuda Katz's project to create a better Ruby on Rails experience on Mac OS X has surpassed its Kickstarter goal of $25,000, with $38,000 already pledged, and 43 days to go. Katz, a Ruby on Rails core team member, lead developer of Merb and serial contributor to many open source projects, explained how he felt using Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X had become hard, losing much of the original promise of early tools such as Locomotive. But since then the tool chain has become so complex that experienced developers lost track of it.

Katz wants to work full time on creating an open source application for Mac OS X which will solve this problem. Once completed, Katz says that it will be maintained by the Rails team and shipped as part of official releases. The application will drag and drop install, manage the installation of working copies of all necessary tools and open a terminal with a working Rails environment. "This will not be a toy Ruby" says Katz "It will be a full-fledged Ruby environment running in an isolated sandbox. My goal is for this mode to be something I personally would use".

Katz also plans to add functionality to make it capable of accepting patch level updates to environments and make it easy to have nightly edge builds. Rails 4 also figures in his plans, as Rails 4 will deprecate support for Ruby 1.8; this means it will become even harder for new users to use the Mac OS X system Ruby to get started, a problem that Katz would like to solve in advance of Rails 4's appearance. He also hopes to make the application a suitable framework for other languages or systems to make use of as a one-click install application.